It was difficult to play Hyper Light Drifter and not feel a deep empathy for the drifter, also alone, also dying from an invisible disease. It’s an easy connection, but when the world is on fire all you can see are embers.
Read MoreThe Off Score Project feels similar to actively listening to vinyl by being a playable album, each track accompanied by a game that ties into the song’s lyrics and mood. A group project between musician YenTing Lo, artist Vanja Mrgan, and programmer Ferran Bertomeu Castells, Off Score is being released a track at a time with the first, Copy Machine, available now on itch.
Read MoreYou could sketch Crossing Souls on a napkin, and it would probably be a smarter, more inclusive game. But I won’t ask you too.
Read MoreGames can often feel like some kind of sorcery, impossibly complex and created by people with inhuman ability. But they’re just people. Highly talented people, but still. Anodyne 2 is not sorcery, but it is a kind of magic, an ordinary magic that is all the more exceptional because of it.
Read MoreEvan’s Remains is untidy, its themes barely cohesive. But if it were not so unusual, if it had simply doubled-down on puzzles and pretty screens, I do not think it would have left half the impression it did.
Read MoreSaving You From Yourself is not meant to be subtle. It is raw and messy, screaming for you to get it and do better. Backgrounds and character models form collages across the screen as scenes shift and the situation becomes direr as if each image barely has time to come together. There is no room for bad faith interpretations, the experience is too provocative, too direct.
Read MoreHad Signs of the Sojourner allowed the player to fail without having the door slammed in their face, it would be easier to forgive some of the flatness present in its card system or the brevity of its script. But by framing conversations as games to be won without anticipating how often they’d be lost, huge chunks of the game become sequences of frustrating nonsequiturs.
Read MoreNear Death consistently hits the highs of the best survivalist fiction, so engrossing as to cause me to turn up the heat in my own home out of fear. But it is a story we have heard before.
Read MoreOrwell tries to introduce safeguards into the surveillance operation but in doing so further highlights how futile these measures are in protecting from false imprisonment and machine bias. If we are beginning the conversation at “how do we ethically implement a mass surveillance system” we have already lost.
Read MoreZoomed out, Corruption 2029 looks like what you’d expect The Bearded Ladies to do next. But there is no soul, no justification for the game’s existence, and numerous moments where it feels actively inferior to a game that came out two years ago.
Read MoreI like so much of what *Mutant* is attempting to do. It's so frustrating that everything begins to fall apart right as the game comes into its own.
Read MoreWandersong may not reference tarot cards directly, but its thematic questions are such that they map almost too well to be purely circumstantial. Whether you believe tarot cards hold any spiritual power or are merely a useful tool for introspection, I hope this analysis helps you appreciate how cleverly Wandersong employs and subverts archetypes that have existed for generations, and, more broadly, how tarot cards can be used to explore narrative and the act of interpretation.
Read MoreI do believe Tiger & Squid had good intentions, and Beyond Eyes is far from paving any roads to hell. I just wish they had spent as much time considering Beyond Eyes’ framing device and mechanics as they did editing its trailer.
Read MoreTruffle Troubles has given me no answers to the wonder and bemusement I felt from that old magazine. It has filled me with the purest and most incomprehensible unease, the way one feels when they find something molding in the back of their refrigerator.
Read MoreEpistory recognizes that typing is no longer a novelty. Everyone will be coming to the game with their own typing quirks, and rather than try to strong-arm the player into finally using their pinkie, Epistory wants every player to enjoy typing on their own terms.
Read MorePathologic 2 deconstructs the player/game dichotomy even as it celebrates how affecting that relationship can be. It is rich and dense and uncompromising. That it exists at all is an anomaly, but one I can only hope doesn’t stay that way.
Read MoreUnbound Creations’ Headliner: Novinews is a hyper-compressed exploration of how society reflects the stories it tells, and what this means when the powerful hold all the pens.
Read MoreTokyo Dark is so bizarre and mangled that it is difficult to pin down where it falls off the rails. It can be both deftly thoughtful and entirely distasteful within the same scene, as if two different games were stapled together and forced to fight to the death.
Read MoreWhere the Bees Make Honey does not go further than suggesting that maybe things were easier as kids, and that a call center is mentally harming us.
Read MoreHellblade enters not at the point of trauma but everything that comes after. The anguish, the self doubt, the violent attempts to feel anything at all, and finally, the recognition that this trauma is permanent.
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